The present invention relates to clock delay adjustment circuitry. In particular, the present invention relates to the generation of a set of phase vectors and the generation of output clocks that have precise phase relationships to an input clock.
Previous art includes the Rambus patent, U.S. Pat. No. 5,485,490, by Leung and Horowitz, which discloses two independent loops, the first of which creates a fixed number of phase vectors, the second of which creates an output clock that is in phase with the input clock. Also disclosed in this patent is the use of separate circuitry to create a leading phase clock to the output clock by selecting a pair of phase vectors and interpolating between them to produce an output that leads the output clock by the delay between phase vectors available from the first loop.
IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 29, No. 12, December 1994, Lee, et. al. ("Lee") discloses a pair of delay-locked loops (DLL) for transmitting and receiving data in DRAMs. IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 31, No. 4, April 1996, Tanoi et al. shows a two-loop architecture in which a frequency locked-loop (FLL) is designed to lock onto an external input frequency and to control the DLL for lock-in to the phase of the external input clock.
It is desirable to improve on the generation of a leading output clock to the in-phase output clock. There are several drawbacks to the invention disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,485,490. Phase-locked loop circuitry employing a VCO and single order loop filter to create phase vectors is a second order system. This second order system has stability problems associated with its operation. Furthermore, the VCO phase lock loop accumulates phase error in response to sudden changes in phase on inputs to the loop, where the input includes not only the input clock but also the power supplies to the loop. This occurs because the loop changes the frequency of the VCO in response to a sudden phase change and this frequency shift is integrated to become phase error which persists for a time on the order of the reciprocal loop bandwidth (see Lee, above). This causes the loop to be noise sensitive when the noise is in the form of sudden phase shifts. Another drawback regarding the prior art patent is that the subloop used for generating the in-phase clock relies on the accuracy and similarity of a second phase interpolator (out-of-phase phase interpolator) to produce the leading clock. Any lack of matching between the out-of-phase phase interpolator and the in-phase phase interpolator will create a phase error in the desired phase relationship between the leading clock and the in-phase clock. Another drawback concerns the acquisition time of the VCO which can be quite long after restoration of a lost input clock, depending on how long the input clock has been absent.